Drupalcon Boston 2008 - community

Vintage Faith Church

gman — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 04:19:13 +0000

Drupal sometime gets a bad name because designers have a hard time theming the site. It is true that you need to know more PHP than a designer ever wants to know, but if you get a good theme implementor, working along side your design, you can get sites look like this: Vintage Faith Church.

This church needed a website that they could updated more easily than flat HTML files through Dreamweaver, and one that would use an in house designer, with custom art an photography donated by the community. They also have a Drupal developer willing to theme and implement the entire site.

As you can see from the screenshots, we wanted to avoid the typical boxy feel of websites, but still make it highly usable for members and guests. The fly out menu provided by Nice Menus helps with the usability. The theme backgrounds shift as you navigate the site providing a consistent, yet distinct feel to each section of the site.

Besides the theming, there is no custom code on the site. GMap was used to a group locator, CCK and Views of course to create and display different announements, events and group content types. Audio was used to let different musical artists upload some of the custom creations. In hindsight I may have used on of the other Media CCK field formats (like mediafield), but no a big deal. Core Aggregator is used to combine many of the pastor’s blogs together and flickr is a great tool to embed our photographer’s image captures of gatherings, events, and shelter work.

We also used wymeditor, with IMCE, and a couple Panels (version 1) to round things out.

Star Wars Artists Guild

EclipseGc — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:54:23 +0000

The Star Wars Artists Guild is a fan site devoted primarily to the needs of players of the Star Wars Role Playing Game. Founded initially to fill the void that most gamers are not artists, SWAG entered into internet as an off-shoot of swrpgnetwork.com. After a short time SWAG broke off and became its own site. Initial development was done with pmachine by Chris Curtis and Derek Jones. Some years later the site was given to Kris Vanderwater in the hopes that he would keep it running instead of letting it fall apart.

SWAG was re-launched using Drupal less than a year ago. Currently the site is made up of over 2300 member about 90 of which actually contribute art. The site drove the creation of the imagefield_gallery module (which was recently submitted to the Drupal community at large). Functionality of the website includes a rather active forums and blogs section. Blogs include the ability to add images which are displayed to the user in a nice lightbox2 style output. Image module runs the main gallery portions of the site.

Quebec Chronicle Telegraph

incrn8 — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:32:39 +0000

The Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph is North America’s oldest newspaper, and is the main source of English news in Quebec City. The original static website was revamped to allow community submissions of news articles, photos and classifieds. CCK and Views form the basis for the site, while the Ubercart and Premium Content modules allow for subscription-based access to content by assigning the appropriate roles depending on the subscription purchased. The newspaper publisher now administers all parts of the site.

RedBlueAmerica

Laura — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:08:11 +0000

RedBlueAmerica is a news-and-debate website we designed and developed for The E. W. Scripps Company. From the press release:

The site will serve as an ongoing public forum for a full array of user- generated content, including blogs, personal profiles, videos and more. While focusing at the outset on the 2008 election campaigns, RedBlueAmerica intends to provide the public with an open forum for a wide range of cultural and political views long after the votes have been counted….

With some extensive use of CCK combined with some fancy theming, we developed a site where a neutral article can be displayed along with two opinionated articles — representing the “red” and “blue” political perspectives — that address the same topic. Also added are blogs, polls, a custom poll section called “Truth or Not?” and some less obvious features, such as private messaging.

The traffic projections were such that we had to anticipate and prepare for some fairly robust traffic and posting activity on the site, so we spec’d out and configured an enterprise-level multi-server hosting setup. We did some additional benchmarking and performance tuning to bring the site performance up.

The not-quite-standard page layout, and targeted Doubleclick advertising placement requirements, led to some interesting challenges in theming, including separating the comments (labeled “thoughts” on the site) from the nodes (aka “posts” for readers not familiar with Drupal), which ordinarily would load in tandem, so as to pull them up in separate containers on the page. (We could only blame ourselves for any interesting challenges due to the design, since we did the design ourselves.) Also fun was coding up the custom voting widget on the main topics, which involved some custom image mapping tied in with the voting API, with some jQuery goodness thrown in for good measure.

Diomass.org

tkinnel — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:16:21 +0000

Diomass.org serves the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, which covers the eastern section of Massachusetts, including the metropolitan Boston area. The diocese is home to approximately 77,000 parishioners in nearly 200 parishes.

The web site has 3 basic audiences: parishioners in the diocese, seekers who are looking for spiritual resources, and church clergy and lay leaders. The site is divided into a more public section which contains news and events from the diocese, as well as descriptions of the church mission and mission-related activities; and a section which covers governance issues which are of interest only to clergy and parish lay leaders (“Inside the Diocese”).

Red Room

ladylolauren — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:53:06 +0000

Red Room is the online home of many of the world’s greatest writers. Through original, author-generated content, redroom.com offers a trustworthy and creative social network unlike any other. In the Red Room, you can connect with your favorite authors, access current news, and comment on features and blogs. By showcasing writers, redroom.com fosters true community between authors and readers and inspires the next generation.

While anyone is welcome to become a regular member of the site (called a reader), Red Room only gives select writers the user status of author. Users of the author class are able to create an author page on redroom.com and access a variety of content publishing tools allowing authors to easily maintain a web presence and a dialogue with their audience.

Many high profile authors including Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini and Salman Rushdie have been on the site since day one. Red Room already has more than 400 authors participating and that number continues to grow each day.

JustCauseIt.com

Gregory Heller — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:07:13 +0000

JustCauseIt.com is the website for the upcoming print magazine, JUST CAUSE. The website provides editorial content from the magazine and expanded coverage on topics covered in the magazine including directories of organizations, calendars of related events and interactive blogging for individuals, organizations and corporate CSR. This vibrant social network allows many voices to be heard, and facilitates civic engagement on a local level – while still linking people across the country around common causes.

The initial version of the site was built in approximately 3 months with a cross functional team including a Project Manager, Lead Engineer, Theme Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer, Information Architect, Visual Designer and Application Specialist. The client was closely involved in the process from its inception and continues to be as new features are deployed on an iterative basis.

The site makes significant use of CCK, Views and Panels, as well as Organic Groups and a number of other contributed modules.

brass|Teacher Resource Center

jranck88 — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:47:09 +0000

The brass|TEACHER RESOURCE CENTER (TRC), part of the brass|STUDENT PROGRAM, is a place for high school teachers to create a community of their own, centered around helping high school students understand the money side of life.

Features of the TRC include:

brass|MAGAZINE articles
Downloadable classroom activities to use with brass content
Student Program blog
Forums to share ideas, news and support
Ability to create a profile and participate in an online community of educators
Student Program news, contests and photos

Allindians.com

tony — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:08:30 +0000

Allindians.com is India’s own social networking portal to connect with fellow indians based in and out of India. The feature requests for developing Allindians.com was huge and required flexibility to connect various sections of the website as and when required.
This made us think about drupal for developing the website and we are happy today after taking our decision. The site now has more than 1000 regular users and the number is increasing everyday.

The main features of this website includes

Detailed User profiles
Connecting with Friends
Member Search
Uploading and Sharing Photos
Uploading and Sharing Videos from other Video sites (Currently supports Youtube, Google Videos)
Blogs for all members
Allindians.com Unique Rewards program.
Inviting friends from your existing contacts (From Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook, Plaxo, AOL etc)

Features coming soon:

Questions & Answers
Business Directory
Discussion Forums
Communities
Knowledge Center
Sections for Men, Women, Kids and Teens.
Personal Money Manager
Moviebox (All happenings at Bollywood Industry) and lot more.

Thanks,
Tony

Ourfernie.com

marcingy — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:00:22 +0000

Ourfernie is a community website for the town of fernie based in South Eastern BC. It receives approximately 900 unique visitors a day. In the 2 years since it was launched it has become the most popular site servicing the town of Fernie. It utilises the openresort booking engine to provide it with an income stream and provides a ‘fully’ functional forum which shows just what can be done with the Drupal forums module.